Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Haidt uses the metaphor of a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious reasoning part of the brain and it can see very far, and make certain steering decisions, but most of the work is done by the elephant, which is the unconscious part of the brain. Haidt’s work is to try to explain what the elephant is doing.
So in your efforts to answer the question Heckman poses, you ended up reading books about neuroscience proper?
Right. And I started with the easy ones. One very accessible one, but by a guy who is very serious, is a book called The Happiness Hypothesis. It’s by Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist at the University of Virginia.
People seem to absolutely rave about this book. One online reviewer says: ‘This is my all-time favourite book. It contains the most practical advice for daily living I have ever seen.’ And a lot of them seem to be like that: ‘The most entertaining, interesting, educational book I have ever read,’ etc, etc. So what does it reveal about the working of our minds?
Haidt uses the metaphor of a boy and an elephant. He says our minds are structured like a boy riding an elephant, and the boy is the conscious reasoning part, the cortex-based brain. And it can see very far, and make certain steering decisions. But most of the work is done by the elephant, which is the unconscious part of the brain. His work is to try to explain what the elephant is doing.
In his research, he focuses especially on moral judgments. So he tells his students the story of a brother and a sister who are off on a trip somewhere. They decide one night they’re going to have sex with each other. They do it, they find it pleasant, and decide they’ll never do it again. But they are glad they did it. And he asks: ‘Is that wrong?’ And most people say it is. But they can’t really explain why they feel that way.
He says that feeling of disgust that we experience is a moral feeling that flows unconsciously, it’s not based on conscious reasoning. And he argues that most of our moral decisions are that kind of an instant reaction. It’s like aesthetics: when we see a scene we know instantly if it’s beautiful or not. We know instantly if something feels moral to us or not.
So the idea that it might be as a result of our upbringing, that we’ve been told that a brother and sister having sex is wrong, but it becomes so firmly ingrained that we don’t even understand why it’s wrong?
I think I would say, and he would say and most scientists would say, that it’s the result of two flows of information. One is the genetic, and in every culture under the sun, incest is regarded as wrong. There is no human culture that really tolerates incest. There’s that sort of knowledge. So we do have some moral knowledge that just comes to us genetically: a sense of fairness, a sense of reciprocity. All humans have these, except psychopaths. So some of that is genetic. But then it’s underlined by cultural things; that’s the second flow of information. And those cultural things may be learned consciously, but are also stored in the elephant.
Read full interview
David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who writes about politics and American culture. He joined the Weekly Standard at its inception in 1995, and prior to that was op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. He argues that it will soon be hard to understand anything about the world around us without a knowledge of the unconscious workings of the brain. So we may as well make a start now, by reading the five books he recommends on neuroscience. The working title of his own book on the subject, due out in January 2011, is How Success Happens.
